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Festschrift: Turner in Chicago
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Since Barcelona, I’ve also travelled to Chicago to attend a meeting in honor of the 60th birthday of Michael Turner, Professor at the University of Chicago, and a former head of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate of the US National Science Foundation. Mike was one of my Ph.D. Supervisors, along with Josh Frieman, and…
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Planck’s First Light
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I’m happy to be able to point to ESA’s first post-launch press release from the Planck Surveyor Satellite. Here is a picture of the area of sky that Planck has observed during its “First Light Survey”, superposed on an optical image of the Milky Way galaxy: (Image credit: ESA, LFI and HFI Consortia (Planck); Background…
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The Universe is a Beautiful Place
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Or at least it’s very pretty. These are new pictures from the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope: NGC 6302 is a “planetary nebula”, material ejected from an aging star in our Milky Way galaxy; Omega Centauri is a globular cluster, a dense agglomeration of stars on the outskirts of the galaxy; the Carina Nebula is the…
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Tying Myself in Knots
I’ll be appearing this Thursday, September 3, at the newly-reopened Whitechapel Gallery‘s Study Studio as part of “Knot Night“, hosted by sculptor Richard Wentworth. Richard has produced a box (or vitrine, if you want to be all art-world about it) called “A Confiscation of String” for the Gallery, and so a few of us have…
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Blogging Anniversary, and Other Celebrations
I was sitting in the lecture theatre of the Royal Institution at the Science Online London meeting (of which I hope to write more later, but you can retroactively follow the day’s tweets or just search for the day’s tags) when I realized I had missed the fifth anniversary of this blog this past July.…
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Elvis blues
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Today is the thirty-second anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. It was recently brought to my attention that I am now older than he was on that day. But rather than sit in the bathroom and eat cheeseburgers, I’ll just leave you with this: I was thinking that night about Elvis Day that he died, day…
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Healthcare for profit and for good
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OK, if you are bored with my occasional forays into politics or religion, I apologize for this post on a subject about which I know even less. I was preparing a long post on my expatriate view of the US healthcare system versus the UK NHS (and I’ve even had a few years under the…
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Astronomical Objects, Near and Far
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The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) is the “deepest” optical observation of the Universe: eleven days of Hubble Space Telescope observations concentrated on a tiny patch of sky. I recently came across this three-dimensional mockup of the HUDF, using our measurements of the redshifts (related to the distances) of each of the galaxies in the…
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On the Dark Side?
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A few weeks ago, I took part in a “Big Questions” debate with Subir Sarkar, a colleague from Oxford, on Dark Energy and the Fate of the Universe. For those of you who couldn’t attend, a related podcast is available, you can download my meagre slides, and it’s been mentioned on Physics World, as well…
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